There was a time when teachers had one job: Teaching.

Start with the alphabet. Teach them to read, write, calculate, understand the world and grow into capable adults.

Somewhere along the way, America’s most powerful teachers’ unions rewrote the rules.

Wages, benefits and working conditions are the rightful business of a labor union. Gender ideology, pronouns and cultural activism are not. Yet the latter is where union energy increasingly goes, much to the detriment of students.

Parents send their children to school to acquire knowledge, not a political agenda. Teachers were doing plenty already, what with lesson planning, grading, classroom management and dealing with kids who arrive with every kind of need.

They shouldn’t be further burdened with the task of advancing someone else’s ideology.

A classroom isn’t a campaign office, and a child isn’t a political pawn.

Consider what this looks like in practice. A 6-year-old comes home talking about changing pronouns or “being born in the wrong body,” concepts the parents never introduced and with which the child is developmentally unprepared to process.

The school treats the parents’ questions as resistance. A middle-schooler is socially transitioned at school without the family being told, leaving the parents to discover it only after the fact, their trust shattered.

Students who still cannot decode basic words or multiply fractions sit through indoctrination sessions that prioritize contested adult theories over the skills they desperately need. Confused children are fed institutional messages that conflict with what they are taught at home, then carry that conflict into family relationships that were once a source of safety.

Education teaches children how to think. How to weigh evidence, question assumptions and form their own conclusions. Inculcation tells them what to think, presenting one contested worldview as settled truth.

That distinction is consequential. It is the difference between forming independent minds and manufacturing agreement.

Parents come from every religion, culture, political party and moral tradition. Public schools exist to serve all of them. That is precisely why ideological restraint is essential in the classroom. The moment a school begins advancing one side’s answers on the most intimate questions of identity and belief, it stops being a shared public institution and starts becoming a contested one.

Meanwhile, too many students still cannot read at grade level, struggle with basic math and leave school unprepared for real life. National assessments continue to show ever larger percentages of children failing to master the fundamentals. There is no shortage of urgent educational work.

If unions can mobilize this hard for cultural causes — utilizing organizing, messaging, political pressure and classroom materials — imagine what that same intensity could achieve if directed toward literacy, classroom discipline and genuine academic mastery.

Every hour spent on adult political ideology is an hour not spent helping a child finally crack the code of reading or grasp fractions. Those lost hours do not come back.

Children get one childhood and a limited number of school years. Those years are not disposable.

They deserve rigorous teaching, honest history, real science and the freedom to form their own minds, not another adult agenda competing for their attention or the quiet erosion of the bond between parent and child.

Parents do not stop being parents when the school bus doors close, and teachers don’t replace them.

Union moguls are even less qualified for the job.

Let parents parent, teachers teach and children learn.

It’s time to stop drifting from ABCs to Xs and Ys.

It’s time to go back to the beginning of the alphabet.